Razed House, Adept

This one is the Razed House (15x12), a building that's seen better days and probably shouldn't still be standing, especially if you're looking at your bonus variant which apparently has an eldritch portal glowing underneath. If you're a potential buyer I'd say you can probably fill up that portal with some cement or sand, it'll be alright.

Sorry this one is a little late- I've been a bit unwell for the last week and couldn't get much work done as a result. I'll be on vacation next week but I'm planning on coming back healthy and ready to whip up 4 new maps for April.

 1. I've been having a hard time coming up with building layouts recently, so this time I thought I would start by sketching out my previous house, which was small enough to be a lovely little peasant's hovel but a little too small for my purposes here so I expanded it a little to give a bit more space for fighting.

The main reason why I thought this would make for a good map was the circular layout, you could walk in a circle around the place without stepping in a few of the rooms, which honestly is a pretty solid dungeon layout. I was initially planning on having a few of the middle walls broken down but I thought it would be a shame to remove some of the nooks and crannies so I ultimately decided to keep them standing.

 2. I always forget that drawing realistic/believable rubble is actually way harder than just drawing regular props. Rubble is tricky because when you need it you usually need a lot of it, which is both a lot of work and also really hard to arrange so as to fill in the space without overwhelming the map with excessive/confusing detail. I think the key is to get the right balance here, where there's lots of small piles of rubble that are made up mostly of just a few pieces of lumber or stone, and a few larger piles with bigger and more eyecatching chunks of building. I think this gets the idea of destruction across effectively without the need to fill each room up with collapsed roofs, piles of ash, and the debris of every bed, piece of clothing, or chair.

Anyway, I didn't necessarily want to too heavily imply that a fire destroyed this building, though I think that's the most likely cause. I wanted to make sure the map looked just vaguely devastated enough that it could pass for a building that's been struck by meteors, abandoned and slowly degrading, ran through by a car, etc.

 3. Along those same lines, I didn't want to color the building to look explicitly like it was burnt up. I definitely implied it, but I kept it a bit vague intentionally, instead leaning into more of an abandoned/spooky palette which I think toes the line nicely. That said, I think I could have made some corners a little darker but I'm always very cautious these days about ensuring that the map isn't too dark so often I end up a little too careful and skimp on some shadows. Not too bad, but could use a little more work.